The present invention relates generally to service level agreements (SLAs) and, more particularly, to the automatic creation of standard SLAs for computing architectures.
Presently, a variety of cloud-based information technology (IT) management systems are available to enable a service provider to manage resources (e.g., computer hardware, software, data, networks and data center facilities) for one or more clients (e.g., internal or remote clients). One tool that may be used by IT managers is an online service catalogue, which may be accessed by one or more clients. In general, a service catalogue provides the ability to contain critical information in a central repository accessible by both the IT service provider and their client(s). In general, service catalogues may include a user interface which enables users to request specific services or IT solutions from one or more vendors. For example, a service catalogue may include a plurality of selectable icons and means for entering information (e.g., number and type of hardware components to be requested, etc.).
An IT service provider may provide clients with an end-to-end (E2E) solution such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), wherein the service provider supplies an application program or system to run the program, along with all the hardware and/or software components and resources to meet the client's requirements, such that no other parties need be involved.
A commitment between an IT service provider and a client is referred to as a service-level agreement (SLA). The SLA includes particular aspects of a service agreed to by the parties, such as quality, availability and responsibilities. An element of the SLA may be a Service Level Objective (SLO). SLOs are agreed upon as a means of measuring the performance of a service provider, such as availability, throughput, frequency, response time or quality. SLAs may include a technical definition in mean time between failure (MTBF), mean time to repair or mean time to recovery (MTTR), which identify: which party is responsible for reporting faults or paying fees; the responsibilities for various data rates; throughput; jitter; or similar measurable details.
Typically, predefined SLAs for individual IT components (e.g., hardware components, network appliance disk uptime, disaster recovery, etc.) may be looked up and utilized as a starting point for negotiating an application or infrastructure SLA. Today, such infrastructure SLAs (e.g., E2E application services) are developed manually by administrators, who may take into account predefined SLAs associated with individual components (e.g., hardware) utilized in providing the IT services.